The exhibitions of the Victorian and Edwardian eras are the lens through which this book examines the economic, cultural, and social forces that helped define Britain and the Empire. It focuses on exhibitions in England, Australia, and India from the Great Exhibition to the Festival of Empire.

Examines the phenomenon of human exhibitions in nineteenth-century Britain and considers how this legacy informs understandings of race and empire today.

The hands of colonized subjects - South Asian craftsmen, Egyptian mummies, harem women, and Congolese children - were at the crux of Victorian discussions of the body that tried to come to terms with the limits of racial identification. While religious, scientific, and literary discourses privileged hands as sites of physiognomic information, none of these found plausible explanations for what these body parts could convey about ethnicity. As compensation for this absence, which might betray the fact that race was not actually inscribed on the body, fin-de-siècle narratives sought to generate models for how non-white hands might offer crucial means of identifying and theorizing racial identity. They removed hands from a holistic corporeal context and allowed them to circulate independently from the body to which they originally belonged. Severed hands consequently served as 'human tools' that could be put to use in a number of political, aesthetic, and ideological contexts.

“Eschewing simple formulation of power's dependence on display, Saloni Mathur offers a brilliantly original disentangling of the anxious and involuted attempts to manage India as an 'aesthetic' project. Her account is rich in archival research, theoretically elegant, and exceptionally engrossing. With remarkable clarity, it opens colonial rule's 'cultural techniques' to a new set of illuminating questions.”—Christopher Pinney, author of Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India “India by Design is an elegant and precise book, remarkable for its conciseness and clarity. Taking a transnational perspective and deftly engaging postcolonial theory, Mathur explores not only the representations but also the representational practices that shaped imperial, colonial, and postcolonial relations.”—Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, author of Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage “Saloni Mathur's book is a gathering of rare gifts and talents. With the subtle, searching eye of an expert curator, and the analytic skills of a fine scholar, Mathur explores the diverse scales and conflicting values of colonial design and discourse, arts and crafts. Monumental histories of museums are placed beside the petits recits of post-cards; the picturesque Victorian portraiture of Indian life makes a fine contrast with the celebration of 'modern' Indian art in the diasporic world of non-resident Indians. Always open to the lure and pleasure of Imperial display and spectacle, Mathur is equally astute about its underlying strategies of surveillance and subordination. This remarkable work is deeply engaged in the mechanics and mediations of Imperial authority and its visual signs.”—Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University "Saloni Mathur manages to bring together remarkably diverse strands that make up the contemporary visual cultures of India and provide insights for art historians, anthropologists and cultural theorists alike. India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display illuminates issues that are long overdue but hardly ever addressed in the art historical circles. Mathur's command of theory is truly impressive, but even more noteworthy are her insights about Indian modernity and colonial and post-colonial institutions in and outside of the country."—Vishakha N. Desai, President, Asia Society